Aleksandra Blagojević, president and founder of the association, introduced the organisation’s activities and objectives to the people of Banja Luka at the city’s 6th marathon.
Founded in February 2026, Where Is Sara? aims to support families across Bosnia and Herzegovina whose children went missing from maternity wards and to raise public awareness of their stories.
The association will work to ensure that people are aware of their rights, as well as those of their children. (…) We have already begun preparing a set of legislative proposals known as ‘Sara’s Laws’ to help parents who are searching for their children, Blagojević said.
The association is launching its activities following two years of technical and programme preparations. Citizens had the opportunity to become members and support the organisation by purchasing children’s artwork and other items at a charity bazaar.
Blagojević founded the association following her own experience and her search for her child. Sara was declared dead just days after her birth at the University Clinical Centre (UKC) of Republika Srpska in 2018. According to the claims made by the institution and the City Cemetery, she was buried in the children’s section of Banja Luka’s Pobrđe cemetery.
In their search for Sara’s grave, Aleksandra Blagojević and Miloš Kuprešanin had to exhume two bodies from the plot, neither of which was Sara.
After the CIN released its documentary Where Is Sara? in April 2024, the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Banja Luka opened a case ex officio.
During the first year of the investigation, prosecutors questioned 40 witnesses, collected and reviewed around 1,000 pages of documentation, and ordered several expert examinations.
Medical records were obtained from the University Clinical Centre of Republika Srpska, while the prosecution also secured documents from Banja Luka’s City Cemetery detailing the collection of deceased children’s bodies, their placement in the mortuary and their burial.
The prosecution established that an autopsy had been carried out at the University Clinical Centre (UKC) following Sara’s death and that paraffin blocks containing samples of her organs and tissues had been preserved. DNA testing confirmed that the tissue samples belonged to Sara, but this did not answer the central question: where was the little girl?
Sara’s family first reported the case to the prosecution in 2019. The investigation was subsequently closed with a decision not to investigate the case, after expert assessments concluded that there had been no failings in the medical staff’s conduct.
The parents then arranged an exhumation of the grave in which Sara was supposed to have been buried. The results confirmed that she was not in the grave.
The City Cemetery authorities said that the graves might have been mixed up, with Sara’s remains potentially placed in an adjacent grave. With the family’s consent, that grave was also exhumed.
DNA testing revealed that neither Sara nor baby Nataša Stijak, whose mother was also searching for her child, had been buried there.
